CHAPTER 1
ARRIVING AT ASEXUALITY
AT FOURTEEN, I came across the word asexuality the same way most people do: online. I read the words prominently displayed on asexuality.org, the website of the Asexual Visibility and Education Network (AVEN):1 “An asexual person is a person who does not experience sexual attraction.” Asexuality, I learned, is a sexual orientation, just like homosexuality and pansexuality and heterosexuality are sexual orientations. A person who is homosexual is sexually attracted to the same gender; a person who is asexual is sexually attracted to no one.
All of this made sense. Growing up in Silicon Valley had helped me develop a healthy appreciation for alternative lifestyles, and I was pleased that my latest Wikipedia rabbit hole had taught me something new about the world and about other people. I had no trouble believing that asexuality was normal, healthy, and valid, and that these asexual people, or aces, were entitled to long and happy lives without the rest of us pointing and laughing. But learning the term did not change how I viewed myself. I misinterpreted “a person who does not experience sexual attraction” to mean “a person who hates sex”—and so I, personally, could not be asexual. I hadn’t had sex yet, but the idea held great promise. That’s the strange thing about this orientation and all the misconceptions it carries. It is possible to be ace and not realize it, to see the word and still shrug and move on. Definitions are not enough; one must plumb deeper.
Since I assumed I wasn’t asexual, asexuality seemed irrelevant to my life. In this, too, I was wrong. Sexuality is everywhere, and in every place that sexuality touches society, asexuality does too. The issues that aces struggle with are the same issues that people of every orientation are likely to confront at some point in their lives.
Let’s take, for example, the question of how much sexual desire a person is supposed to have. How much is too little? When is too little unhealthy? How might one’s answers, or the answers that are assumed, change depending on gender, or race identity, or disability? What does the amount of desire we experience mean about our politics, our personalities, and our prospects for relationships? What should it mean?
These are broad questions of human experience. The answers look different from the ace perspective—and this book tries to match one with the other. To do so, I interviewed nearly a hundred aces, both over the phone and in person. I asked questions about attraction and identity and love. The answers they provided were rarely simple, as my own experiences have not been simple, as no one’s ever are. The ace way of thinking has many new terms and nuances. Like anything that is honest, it can be messy.
There’s the man who grew up in a religious environment and followed all the rules, only to realize after marriage that sex was not the wonder he had been promised. The woman who ordered blood tests in high school because she was convinced that her lack of desire for sex was a symptom of serious illness. Disabled aces can have trouble fitting into either community, wondering where their disability ends and their asexuality begins, and whether finding that border should matter. Aces of color and gender nonconforming aces question whether their asexuality is a reaction against stereotypes. Everyone wonders how to separate friendship and romance when sex is not part of the equation. Aces who don’t want romantic relationships wonder if there’s room for them in a world hyper-focused on a particular type of partnership. And aces who do want romantic relationships point out how consent practices don’t make room for their needs.
Even in the absence of simple answers, these stories provide a shift in perspective that can shed light on how we all, ace and non-ace alike, relate to our sexualities. Most people are constricted by sexual norms; aces, even more so, at times to the point of exclusion. This affords aces the ability to observe the rules of society from an outsider’s vantage and with an outsider’s insights. Aces draw attention to sexual assumptions and sexual scripts—around definition, feeling, action—that are often hidden and interrogate the ways that these norms make our lives smaller. Aces have developed a new lens that prioritizes what is just over what is supposedly natural.
At fourteen, I knew only that my experience of sexuality didn’t match the experience of aces profiled in magazine articles. I thought I was a straight woman, like almost all my friends and a good portion of the population.
In contrast, many of the aces I read about in articles or interviewed for this project spoke of sensing difference from a young age. Their stories sounded like that of Lucid Brown, a visual artist who recently graduated from Emerson College in Boston. “My mother tried to give me ‘the talk’ three separate times when I was a kid, and I ditched halfway through all three times,” they say. (Lucid, like many people I interviewed, is nonbinary and uses they/them pronouns.)
In middle school, Lucid tells me, everyone hid behind a tree and watched two classmates kiss. The others seemed to feel a thrill of titillation, but Lucid felt only bewilderment, not understanding the appeal of kissing or why anyone would care. Puberty, of course, can be baffling no matter one’s orientation. For aces, the confusion comes not only from being unable to navigate sexuality, but also from feeling excluded from sexuality entirely and watching others participate. Gossip revolves around crushes and kisses. Sex—who’s having it, who might have it, who wants to have it—becomes a key topic of conversation even if no one is doing anything. The new, collective obsession can seem incomprehensible, like everyone else’s brains have been hijacked.
No matter how often Lucid heard whispers about the excitement of sex, they wanted no part of it. The idea of sex, and everything related to sex, remained repulsive. (Different aces have different tolerances. Throughout this book, I use the word sex to mean partnered sexual activity, from making out onward.)
Many sex-repulsed aces say that their reaction to the idea of sex is disgust, “as if you told a straight person you were into bestiality.” For Lucid, the reaction was even stronger. Being exposed to sexual images and comments provoked a physical response that felt like eels squirming and writhing. The eels lived in different parts of Lucid’s body: one in the gut, one along the spine. Accompanying them would be an instant fight-or-flight response, complete with nausea, heart pounding, and freezing in place.
Lucid’s reactions weren’t predictable or intuitive, not as simple as explaining that talking about sex caused a little repulsion while watching sex scenes on TV caused more. An in-depth discussion of a sex act might be worse than an image of a naked body, but it was hard to say why. Such physical reactions were obvious to others, and all this made Lucid a target for a particular flavor of bullying: kids yelling sex jokes at them and “essentially using my sex repulsion against me.”
So, Lucid thought, it was obvious that they weren’t straight. Many aces assume they are gay before wondering whether gay is the correct descriptor. Others come up with the word asexual independently, looking at the other sexual orientations and deducing that this is the only option left. Lucid identified as “nonsexual” until the day they came across a Dear Abby column syndicated in the Maui News.2 New England ACE asked when it would be necessary to disclose their orientation to dates. Abby responded that there was no obligation to tell others right away, adding that the letter-writer wasn’t the only asexual person out there and including a reference to AVEN. Lucid, age thirteen, stole that copy of the newspaper off the dining room table.
The word alone was an answer that made perfect, immediate sense. Lucid was clearly asexual but hadn’t known that there existed a label for this experience. Few do, because it is so widely assumed that everyone is allosexual (or allo), the term for people who do experience sexual attraction. In other words, allosexuals are people who aren’t ace.
“Finding the word asexuality was such an explanation of things that had already happened to me,” Lucid says. “It’s the first time I heard, ‘You can just not have sex,’ and that was incredibly freeing, because as a kid you hear the talk about this big scary thing that’s going to happen and how you’re going to want it, and that’s just terrifying, absolutely terrifying.”
They pause. “It was like the first step, the key that opened the box that had a lot of confusing other boxes. Asexuality was just the clearest one and it helped me get more into the complexities of my identity.” The word granted access to important knowledge that had been unavailable before.
I spent middle school gossiping about crushes on boys. In high school, I fell into a complicated and ambivalent relationship with a female classmate that first made me wonder if I was bisexual and then, when I didn’t like touching or being touched, made me decide I was probably straight after all. Even through college, there was little reason to suspect I might be ace, only that I might be neurotic, shy, and inclined to like men.
The notion that I might be asexual seemed laughable. I found Adrien Brody attractive and Channing Tatum less so and had a vulgar sense of humor, full of sex jokes and sly insinuations that made my more proper friends blush. I spoke of longing and listened intently to stories of sexual adventures, and never did it occur to me that my friends and I might be using the language of desire differently. For them, a word like “hot” could indicate a physical pull of the type Jane had described. For me, “hot” conveyed an admiration of excellent bone structure. Their sexual encounters were often motivated by libido; I didn’t even know that I lacked a libido.
I was a little curious about sex with men because everything—books, television, friends—told me it felt fantastic. But I was very curious about what it would be like to be desired, to be loved by someone that I desired too, desired wholeheartedly in a way that hadn’t been the case with my high school ex. That was the real root of my longing.
Then, Henry. Henry and I met when we were twenty-one. After our first conversation, I wrote “BE STILL MY FUCKING HEART” in my journal, just like that, in all caps. That conversation took place over the internet, he in Texas and I in California. We fell in love anyway, over emails and chats and hours of talking.
I wouldn’t meet Henry in person for nearly a year. A few months after that would be the last time I saw him, but the aftershocks of our relationship would stretch into the future far beyond the amount of time we had actually spent together. A through line can be traced from that first conversation to the question I asked Jane at the Burmese restaurant to this book. Henry will always be one of the ways that I mark “before” and “after” in my life—not just for learning about asexuality, though our relationship provided the impetus for me to do so, but also for understanding romantic love and the obsessive pain of loss.
First love always feels like a miracle. That I fell in love with someone far away, someone I had met believing nothing could happen other than friendship; that we needed to coordinate our lives to be together; that what we felt inside really did change outer reality—all of that made this moment in time, this person, feel even more extraordinary. Our investments marked the relationship as special, and the seriousness of our plan became evidence of the seriousness of our feelings, testaments that our tie went beyond vanity and was more than infatuation. In this, I remain sure, we were not wrong. Nothing then or since has shaken my belief that no matter how excruciatingly immature we might have been, at their core the feelings were both rare and very real.
Texas and California are far apart, but it was senior year of college and everyone’s lives were about to split open anyway. The deal was that we would both move to New York City after graduation. I would take a journalism job and he would go to graduate school. But when Henry was not accepted into any universities in the area, he chose to attend a school in the South and pushed for a five-year, long-distance open relationship.
I was not equipped to handle this arrangement—I, so untrusting and wary of vulnerability that I had written this to myself in my journal: Another thing you need to remember, and something that, for some reason, has never really occurred to you before: You can ask things of others too. You can ask them to compromise. It is not always you who have to.
I should have said no, but I was afraid of losing him. So I made a mistake and said yes.
Before Henry headed to the South for graduate school, he arranged to be in New York for the summer, ostensibly to take language classes but in reality to be with me. Without having met in person, we agreed to find a place together. The months we would spend together already seemed painfully short compared to what we had expected. There was nothing else we wanted so much commuting would be a waste of time.
That summer was painful and there are many reasons we did not work out. Sex was not one of those reasons—not exactly. Our strange courtship might have created problems in many other areas, but we found each other beautiful and I enjoyed having sex with Henry. It felt intimate, like I privy to an experience that others were not. It gave me the feeling I had always wanted: not sexual pleasure, but the thrill of specialness.
Sex itself did not cause problems, but my fear of a specific aspect of sexuality did. Though we were functionally monogamous during those months, the prospect of five years of an open relationship terrified me, and the fact that Henry wanted to have sex with others was hard to take. Convinced that Henry would fall in love with someone else after sleeping with them, any mention of sexual attraction—his or anyone else’s—prompted tortured projections of abandonment.
Soon, dread of an uncertain future overshadowed the safety I had in the present. I wanted to be strong and wanted to run away in equal measure, and that produced the toxic cocktail that ruined the time we did have together. Over and over, I could feel my emotions spinning out of control as I acted in ways I knew were wrong but felt powerless to stop. My panic manifested in constantly trying to break up, so afraid was I of being left. During the nonstop fights, I waved my hand and gave as reasons any number of issues that never directly included the words fear or insecurity. I could neither say that I was afraid nor admit how much I cared.
One day, on the way home from work, I passed a flower shop and on a whim bought red carnations for Henry. When I arrived home and he asked me where I’d gotten the flowers, I became overwhelmed by the prospect of admitting to a kind, spontaneous gesture. I said that I had taken the flowers from someone at work and thought they’d look nice on the dining room table.
Henry eventually had enough and broke up with me, rightly, in the fall. He was gone, but my mind continued to wrap itself around the endless conversations we’d had about why an open relationship was necessary: Henry saying that men would always want to stray because it was natural, that clinging to monogamy was old-fashioned and that I could defeat that desire if I really tried, just a little bit harder.
Henry’s statements created a new, gut-deep fear of anything related to flirting or sex or romance. When my roommate started watching old seasons of Scandal, a glance at the protagonists kissing in some dark hallway sent me to my room with the door shut. If anyone tried to hug me on a date, I drew back immediately. I had never liked being touched by strangers, but, clammy and cynical, I now actively feared it. I missed Henry terribly and now believed that every relationship would end either in betrayal or with the other person feeling trapped.
One evening, nearly two years after I had last seen Henry, I found myself telling my friend Thomas about how badly everything had ended. By this point, I was well-practiced at reciting the events. I was obsessed with them, convinced that people couldn’t understand me without knowing about Henry and convinced that I couldn’t understand myself unless I could answer the question of why we failed—which to me was the same as the question of why I behaved the way I did when I knew better. So many people had heard this story, but Thomas couldn’t understand why I had been worried that Henry might be attracted to someone else and leave me.
“I get being jealous,” Thomas said, “but not your worry that he couldn’t control himself at all. Being sexually attracted to other people happens to all of us.”
“I know, and that’s what terrifies me,” I said. “It’ll happen to everyone and then someone will always be fighting this desire and wanting to cheat, even if they don’t cheat. That seems miserable.”
“I mean, yes,” he said. “Sort of. But also, not really. I’m sure you’ve been sexually attracted to someone that you’re not dating, but it’s often just attraction. Physical. That happens all the time and you manage it. For most people, it’s not some horrible thing you can’t deal with, though I guess it can be. Almost all the time it’s no big deal. We all learn to deal, you know?”
I didn’t know. Nothing he said sounded familiar. I had never experienced “just attraction,” a physical impulse—only emotional desire that manifested physically. I wanted sex with someone only when I was already prepared to change my life for them, so I did not believe Henry when he claimed that wanting sex with others did not have to threaten me. When he talked about how everyone was sexually attracted to everyone else all the time, I could not understand attraction as anything but how I experienced it: emotional yearning—love, really—overpowering and overwhelming, a disaster for our relationship if targeted toward anyone but me. It sounds illogical now, and like incredible naivete, but for me, desire for love and desire for sex had always been one and the same, an unbreakable link. I had been curious about sex but had never wanted to have sex with any person before Henry.
Talking to Thomas prompted me to question why statements he took for granted were revelations to me. I wondered what else I did not know that I did not know about sexual desire. A few months later, I had lunch with Jane and asked her what sexual attraction felt like. It was my first time asking the question, but by then, I already suspected that her answer would not line up with my view of the world.
Ten years after I first came across the term asexuality, I returned to the topic, wanting to figure out what I had misunderstood. I had long known that sexual attraction and sexual behavior are not the same and that one does not necessarily limit the other. I knew that, generally speaking, sexual behavior is under our control while sexual attraction is not. It was always clear that a gay man or a straight woman could each have sex with women without that affecting who either is attracted to. I had understood that asexuality is the lack of sexual attraction while celibacy is the lack of sexual behavior.
Reading more, I understood for the first time that it is possible to lack the experience of sexual attraction without being repulsed by sex, just like it is possible to neither physically crave nor be disgusted by a food like crackers but still enjoy eating them as part of a cherished social ritual. Being repulsed by sex is a fairly obvious indication of the lack of sexual attraction, but a lack of sexual attraction can also be hidden by social performativity or wanting (and having) sex for emotional reasons—and because the different types of desire are bound together so tightly, it can be difficult to untangle the various strands. “People who have never felt sexual attraction do not know what sexual attraction feels like, and knowing whether or not they have ever felt it can be difficult,” writes ace researcher Andrew C. Hinderliter in a 2009 letter to the editor of the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior.3 Yes, exactly.
Sexuality as allos experience it was completely foreign to me, and realizing this in my midtwenties recast much of my life. The switch that turned on for others at puberty had never flipped for me. During this time, most people started masturbating, had wet dreams or sexual fantasies, and became hyperattuned to touch and physicality—the smell of hair or the sight of an exposed shoulder. For some, these developments happen a little later. For others, like me, none of it happened at all. I had grown taller and become moody but did not one day look around and start noticing bodies, let alone start wanting anything from them. My crushes as a teenager, though intense, were little different from the ones I had earlier in life, based on aesthetic attraction and thinking a person clever. Even in fantasy, they never progressed beyond the point when someone I liked said I was worth dating.
Asexuality explained why I had been so perplexed when a high school classmate got pregnant. It was so easy to never have sex, I thought. It was the default state and it took real effort to do anything else. What could have compelled her to take such risks? Now I understood why it hadn’t been so easy. Our experiences had been fundamentally different but not in a way obvious enough to make me question them.
Now I could see the ways my asexuality had protected me. Being ace spared me from sexual distraction, from slut-shaming internal or external, from bad hookups or any hookups at all, from casual relationships that ended in ghosting and confusion. I saw, too, the ways my asexuality—or rather my misunderstanding of it—had hurt Henry and me. Asexuality was never the reason we failed. For that, I have life circumstances, immaturity, and the feedback loop of our worries to blame. Still, being ace and not knowing it inflated the fears that ended us. I had been terrified in large part because I lacked, and did not realize I lacked, personal experience of sexuality—what it means and what it’s like to manage it. Limited by my knowledge, constrained by my experience, I saw monsters where there were only shadows.
Lucid’s story is easy for people to accept; mine, less so. Lucid’s sex repulsion—the eels, the nausea—seems very different from the experience of allos, so people think that’s what asexuality should be like. My experience, on the other hand, might sound typical for a less sexual person in a sexual society, not like anything out of the ordinary or anything that requires a separate identity label. Many allos may find my story familiar and prefer not to identify as asexual. So why do I identify as ace when I could identify as an allo woman who is not sexually motivated?
First, it is because many parts of my experience—like the fact that I never think about sex involuntarily and could be celibate for life with little trouble—line up with the experiences of other aces. Learning about asexuality provoked a shock of recognition and I wanted to honor that. I have always been a stickler for using the word that fits, even when I didn’t like either the experience or the word.
Yet the word asexual by itself would be pointless if it only described an experience and did not connect me to people who helped make that experience legible. Asexuality has always been a political label with a practical purpose, and the more important reason I identify as ace is because it has been useful for me. After my relationship with Henry ended, I had trouble understanding myself or others until I learned about asexuality. I had strong, complicated feelings around romance and sex but lacked the language to express them. Other aces understood. Their presence and writings helped me make sense of myself and my life. Though the process of accepting asexuality involved a lot of internal resistance, it clarified my experience in meaningful ways. It showed me a new way of viewing the world.
The world is not a binary of aces and allos. It is a spectrum, with people like Lucid further from the allo end and people like me closer to it. I am not interested in thinking about aces as a discrete group completely separate from “normal” people or of ace membership as a goal achievable only with a tidy checklist. I refuse to hold ace identity to higher standards of legitimacy than any other orientation. No one thinks that all allosexuals are the same or that they experience sexual attraction at every moment. Their sexual status is not questioned each time they turn down sex. Aces are not a monolith either—and if a more fluid, inclusive definition means that the lines of ace and allo blur and more people can be considered ace, that would only strengthen what we have to say.
This is a book that centers ace experience. Aces today are not concerned with how to have sex, but we are not anti-sex either. We don’t ask people to stop having sex or feel guilty for enjoying it. We do ask that all of us question our sexual beliefs and promise that doing so means that the world would be a better and freer place for everyone. I hope that ace readers see themselves here and feel understood. I hope that non-ace readers also recognize parts of themselves and gain concepts and tools to help them puzzle out their own confusions around how to be in the world. We are all still figuring it out.